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What is Intelligent Agent? Software entities that carryout some set of operations on behalf of a user or another program with some degree of independence or autonomy, and so doing employ some knowledge or representation of a user’s goals or desires.

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Description of an Agent Main components – Perception (sensors) – Reasoning/cognition – Action (actuators) An intelligent agent perceives its environment via sensors and acts rationally upon that environment with its effectors. Rational Agent: For each possible percept sequence, a rational agent should select an action that is expected to maximize its performance measure, given the evidence provided by the percept sequence and whatever built-in knowledge the agent has..

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Possible Properties autonomous – Agents are autonomous – they act on behalf of the user Agents can adapt to changes in the environment Agents not only act reactively, but sometimes also proactively Agents have social ability – they communicate with the user, the system, and other agents as required Agents also cooperate with other agents to carry out more complex tasks than they themselves can handle Agents migrate from one system to another to access remote resources or even to meet other agents

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Home Work For each of the following agents, develop a PEAS description of the task environment: a. Robot soccer player; b. Internet book-shopping agent; c. Autonomous Mars rover; d. Mathematician's theorem-proving assistant.

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Properties of Environments 1. Fully observable/Partially observable. If an agent’s sensors give it access to the complete state of the environment needed to choose an action, the environment is fully observable. Such environments are convenient, since the agent is freed from the task of keeping track of the changes in the environment. 2. Deterministic/Stochastic. An environment is deterministic if the next state of the environment is completely determined by the current state of the environment and the action of the agent; in a stochastic environment, there are multiple, unpredictable outcomes In a fully observable, deterministic environment, the agent need not deal with uncertainty.

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Properties of Environments 3. Episodic/Sequential. An episodic environment means that subsequent episodes do not depend on what actions occurred in previous episodes. In a sequential environment, the agent engages in a series of connected episodes. Such environments do not require the agent to plan ahead. 4. Static/Dynamic. A static environment does not change while the agent is thinking. The passage of time as an agent deliberates is irrelevant. The agent doesn’t need to observe the world during deliberation. If the environment can change while an agent is deliberating, then we say the environment is dynamic for the agent. If the environment does not change with the passage of time but the agent’s performance score does, then we say the environment is semi- dynamic.

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Properties of Environments 5. Discrete/Continuous. – If the number of distinct percepts and actions is limited, the environment is discrete, otherwise it is continuous. 6. Single-agent/Multi-agent. – If the environment contains other intelligent agents, the agent needs to be concerned about strategic, game- theoretic aspects of the environment (for either cooperative or competitive agents) – Most engineering environments don’t have multi-agent properties, whereas most social and economic systems get their complexity from the interactions of (more or less) rational agents.

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Basic Agents Types 1.Table-driven agents use a percept sequence/action table in memory to find the next action. They are implemented by a (large) lookup table. 2.Simple reflex agents are based on condition-action rules, implemented with an appropriate production system. They are stateless devices which do not have memory of past world states. 3.Agents with memory have internal state, which is used to keep track of past states of the world. 4.Agents with goals are agents that, in addition to state information, have goal information that describes desirable situations. Agents of this kind take future events into consideration. 5.Utility-based agents base their decisions on classic axiomatic utility theory in order to act rationally.

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Table Driven Agents Table lookup of percept-action pairs mapping from every possible perceived state to the optimal action for that state Problems – Too big to generate and to store (Chess has about 10 120 states) – No knowledge of non-perceptual parts of the current state – Not adaptive to changes in the environment; requires entire table to be updated if changes occur – Looping: Can’t make actions conditional on previous actions/states.

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Simple Reflex Agent An agent whose action depends only on the current percepts. Rule-based reasoning to map from percepts to optimal action; each rule handles a collection of perceived states Problems – Still usually too big to generate and to store – Still no knowledge of non-perceptual parts of state – Still not adaptive to changes in the environment; requires collection of rules to be updated if changes occur – Still can’t make actions conditional on previous state

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Agents with Memory Encode “internal state” of the world to remember the past as contained in earlier percepts. Needed because sensors do not usually give the entire state of the world at each input, so perception of the environment is captured over time. “State” is used to encode different "world states" that generate the same immediate percept. Requires ability to represent change in the world; one possibility is to represent just the latest state, but then can’t reason about hypothetical courses of action.

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Goal Based Agents Choose actions so as to achieve a (given or computed) goal. A goal is a description of a desirable situation. Keeping track of the current state is often not enough  need to add goals to decide which situations are good Deliberative instead of reactive. May have to consider long sequences of possible actions before deciding if goal is achieved – involves consideration of the future, “what will happen if I do...?”

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Utility based Agents When there are multiple possible alternatives, how to decide which one is best? A goal specifies a crude distinction between a happy and unhappy state, but often need a more general performance measure that describes “degree of happiness.” Utility function U: State  Real indicating a measure of success or happiness when at a given state. Allows decisions comparing choice between conflicting goals, and choice between likelihood of success and importance of goal (if achievement is uncertain).

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Summary An Agent perceives and acts in an environment, has an architecture, and is implemented by an agent program. An Ideal agent always chooses the action which maximizes its expected performance, given its percept sequence so far. An Autonomous agent uses its own experience rather than built-in knowledge of the environment by the designer. An Agent program maps from percept to action and updates its internal state. Reflex agents respond immediately to percepts. Goal-based agents act in order to achieve their goal(s). Utility-based agents maximize their own utility function. Representing knowledge is important for successful agent design. The most challenging environments are partially observable, stochastic, sequential, dynamic, and continuous, and contain multiple intelligent agents.